Enraptured By Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo

I have just started Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo, read maybe 40 pages, and already it has changed my life. Well, it made me want to resume my writing project anyway.

We will get to that.

As someone who ‘writes’  — that is, I write to be read, even paid for it, sometimes — I often get hung up on the process. In the process. As we all do, good or bad. 

Is that the best word? Is this image working?

All part of the ‘enjoyment’, though, especially when you eventually nail the word or clean and shine the image to the clarity of true conviction.

Of course our old friend procrastination drops by uninvited to stall the ball … don’t mind your checking the football news or a quick game of solitaire bliss, triple turn, I’ve even stopped to clip my nails when thwarted by a failing metaphor.

After I finish hoovering my home office. Again.

What’s more serious, though, insidious even, is when you get detained and drained by premature self-evaluation. Tripped up and floored by self-doubt. 

Until finally, skewered on the paralysing certainty of ambition overreached, you stop writing what you’re writing. 

As I did recently. 

I didn’t even know I had stopped until I failed to restart.

Lots of ‘legitimate’ reasons for it. Forget all that.

I have been writing something long form for a while now, for the first time ever. Each stalling tactic, however plausible, had been dealt with, and I was plonking myself in this chair, firing up my lengthening Pages document and belting away. Ready or not, muse or not, here we come. 

More than okay with it not being perfect. Fine with it not amounting to anything much. If it doesn’t. Just pleased to get it down there, sentence by sentence, session by session, and worry about where it might go afterwards.

And then you miss a day. Two, A week. Until, finally, it’s all shite anyway. And me with it.

I’m sure you know what it’s like. I have an image of walking through sludge. Squelching along, slower and slo—w—-e—-r. Slow motion trails to no motion. Wellingtons still straining but …

Stuck. Like a big gobshite, without a shovel or a prayer, waiting for the path to clear.

Or my head.

I’ve read a bit on Sally Rooney, the usual newspaper interviews and stuff when you Google. Interesting enough, but what jumps out for me is what should be obvious, but often isn’t: it’s all about the writing for her.

I read Normal People even before the TV show, which I too loved. Really liked the book. Swooned a little at the sparse elegance of it, which seemed to strip everything back to what mattered: the characters and the story. 

Now, I’m reading Intermezzo. And I am transfixed.

I’m dazzled and impressed … but it’s not just that.

How can I explain … there’s a feeling I get when I listen to a great song, a wonderful piece of music, or fall under a spell of a great movie … I listen, I watch and I follow, but simultaneously, I dream. And I am moved to create.

I interact with the work … it moves me and it transfigures all I see and hear. In this state, the strange seems familiar, the familiar strange — and curious. It takes me to a place that includes me. It doesn’t close me out, leave me outside in the cold, nose pressed against the window pane of unachievable perfection. I am inside the room, inside the magic realm. I belong.

Resume writing? I am itching to do so. Will do so when I finish this.

I don’t aspire to be Sally Rooney, to write like her, or as well as her. I am not her. It doesn’t matter. Because we all matter, every one of us who puts pen to paper, finger to keyboard, and writes. To be read.

I feel like Sally Rooney and I are part of the one tribe. Of writers. Like drops in the ocean that make up a sea. Small and insignificant or large and significant. Part of a collective.

I think she is truly a great writer, this Sally Rooney.

Can I be more specific? Or just specific.

Jeepers, I could stop and point at so many examples along the way over those few pages of Intermezzo I have read. She is an elegant writer, Ms Rooney, but she saves the elegance for what matters. A few words can fetch up a scene, swell the progress, and then the mot juste is dropped in, and just … wow!

She drops the show-off adjectives. She’s perfunctory with punctuation, dismissive of quotation marks, and really can’t be bothered with digressive descriptions. Economy and elegance are indivisible. And it works. 

A brief example:

We have Peter, a main character, walking in Dublin city to meet one of the two significant women in his life. It’s stream of conscious, Peter walking, musing, described and interpreted, interwoven with brief brushstroke dabs of local colour as he moves. Part of it goes:

‘She has found a table in a restaurant in Temple Bar, pin dropped, what does he think? Types back: See you in 5. Lord Edward Street at night, walking down towards the college gates. Scenery of old romances, drunken revelries. Four in the morning getting sick there outside the Mercantile. Remembering that. Scholarship night. Young then. Mixing memory and desire. Dark remembered walkways. Graveyard of youth.’

The only writer I can think of comparing her with is Ian McEwan. Where the words are so well chosen, and so perfect and correct, you could not imagine the scene or character description written any other way.

The familiar otherness of people, and sex and the world. Each body is a new and familiar universe to explore. The particular in the universal, the universal in the particular. All the kind of guff Ms Rooney probably hates.

And what of it?

Just check out Intermezzo